Free unlimited MP3 music downloads for broadband subscribers in France

probe

Loop unbundling generates real competition in the broadband market. For example in France, on top of 20 Mbits/sec internet access, free unlimited phone calls to 50 countries and a cable TV replacement with 73 channels free (all for under EUR 30 - including your phone line), neuf.fr has recently announced that it was adding free music downloads into the package.

“Customers who sign up for Neuf Cegetel's package of high-speed Internet, fixed-line telephone and cable television for €29.90 a month will be able to download as many titles as they want from one of nine musical genres, such as pop or jazz, in Universal's digital catalog. An additional €4.99 a month will provide unlimited access to all nine genres -- 150,000 pieces of music and 3,000 video clips.

"It's clever," said John Davies, an analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort. "It gives you part of the offer and if you're a hard-core fan, you'll pay for full access." He added, "a bit of differentiation never goes amiss." (WSJ – link below)

Eircom still controls 95% of the DSL market in Ireland, and uses every trick in the book to prevent loop unbundling to become a reality for Irish internet users, keeping prices high and speeds low - with the apparent backing of ComReg who has done nothing effective to penalise eircom for loop monopolisation, and force them to behave. Eircom even has the brass neck to ask the government for a deal to take over the state funded metropolitan area networks (MANs) - which were put there in an attempt to make it easier for other ISPs to compete in the market.

Eircom's residential offerings of 1 to 3 Mbits/sec DSL broadband are among the slowest and most grossly over-priced in Europe.

There is no alternative to DSL, aside from fibre and cable. Wireless is not reliably scalable - particularly in urban areas - to meet multi-media broadband requirements. Irish cable is monopolised by a most incompetent company which seems to have great difficulty answering the telephone and running a functional website, not to mind running a DOCSIS III cable network in a functional manner.

Ireland - Europe's capital of infrastructural dysfunctionality!

.probe

Neuf Telecom article in WSJ: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118766174906403733.html

BT’s problems getting loop unbundling operational at the Nutley RSU in D4:
http://www.comreg.ie/_fileupload/publications/ComReg0759.pdf

watty

There is no point to DOCSIS3 unless there is fibre to the Kerb, or you ditch the TV channels. It only aggregates what would have fed separate modems, it creates no extra bandwidth or speed on the cable media.

Wireless is scalable by reducing cell size. I'm getting about 6 to 10Mbps on wireless and there is no DSL here anyway.

But yes, the general thrust is true.

I do not know why you keep Taunting us from France, Probe.

rc28

I was in France and the people we were visiting had excellent adsl, they had free calls to loads of countries,including ireland, via wi-fi phones. Their broadband market is one of the best in europe- you can get hdtv,24mb adsl and telephone for under 30euro per month.

bealtine

watty wrote:

I do not know why you keep Taunting us from France, Probe.

because not so long ago FT made TE look like stellar providers, in other words FT was utterly useless.
With a regulator and the political will to create real competition things changed and now they have a very good innovative system.

Some day we'll have a regulator here...not the spare paper clip department of Eircom we have.

probe

watty wrote:

Wireless is scalable by reducing cell size. I'm getting about 6 to 10Mbps on wireless and there is no DSL here anyway.

Sure wireless is scalable by reducing the cell size, but if everyone uses wireless for internet access you'll need UMTS cellsites on virtually every street and road. Thousand of them. Ugly, visually polluting, and pushing radiation exposure on the human body to the limit. They won't get the planning permission for this. People will be up in arms. Politically and healthwise unacceptable. If they keep selling mobile broadband access and get a large chunk of the market, the existing poor mobile phone quality in Ireland will get 1,000% worse - because in the absence of a massive expansion in cellsite numbers, the entire mobile system will slowly break down.

I do not know why you keep Taunting us from France, Probe.

Because every time I go to third world Ireland I get rather frustrated with network performance - slow download speeds, high contention ratios and high costs. Not to mention appalling VoIP quality - which one suspects is a result of traffic shaping games to make things virtually unusable to force people to use the ultra-expensive PSTN instead - particularly for European and international calls.

In any event, the point of this posting was to underscore yet again how loop unbundling in France is forcing the providers to deliver more and more goodies all the time. Free music downloads being the latest iteration.

Wireless is not used as an alternative to DSL in any other European country to any material extent, because DSL loop unbundling works and most countries now have ADSL2+ running at full 18 to 26 Mbits/sec rates for 30 to 40 Euros a month. The incumbents have been forced to match this - even dozy France Telecom and Portugal Telecom.

But not eircom. One has to ask why? How are they getting away with offering only3 Mbits/sec at huge prices + charging for a phone line on top of that?

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culabula

It wasn't mentioned that there are huge restrictions on the downloads and that they disappear *pouf** the day you leave Neuf.

Incidentally, the speed, price and offer are all great but be prepared to lose your sanity the day you try to do/configure anything with a neufbox. Wifi is (was) restricted to one user unless you downloaded and installed some silly file (which then had a habit of self-destructing next time you rebooted). The same applies to Alice.

I have talktalk in Belfast and enjoy 8MB speeds, free calls to most destinations and a low rental (roughly 30€ a month, a saving of 15€ once talktalk took over) for a lot MORE. Hopefully the people at Crapphone W will do the same for the Rest Of Ireland in due course.

*en francais dans le texte

probe

culabula wrote:

It wasn't mentioned that there are huge restrictions on the downloads and that the disappear *pouf** they day you leave Neuf.

Incidentally, the speed, price and offer are all great but be prepared to lose your sanity the day you try to do/configure anything with a neufbox. Wifi is (was) restricted to one user unless you downloaded and installed some silly file (which then had a habit of self-destructing next time you rebooted). The same applies to Alice.

Given that Neuf has only launched the service this week, and you appear to be based in Belfast (and apparently happy with 8 Mbits/sec up there), one has difficulty deciphering the real point of your posting. If you don't like neuf.fr when in France you can dump it and go to free.fr or someone else. Most of them don't have minimum contract periods.

In the same way as if you don't like the editorial tone in a particular newspaper - you stop buying it and try something else.

I don't use France Telecom. I don't use a vendor supplied box - I buy my own kit and do anything I want with it without restriction. They all operate on the same standards.

.probe

PS: Neuf MP3 conditions: - you can only play music/videos on 3 PCs and 3 MP3 players with windows media player DRM during the period of your subscription to their service.

What more do you want please?

<<Neuf Music : Pendant la durée de votre abonnement Internet Haut Débit 100% Neuf Box, vous pouvez télécharger et écouter, sur 3 PC équipés de Windows Media Player et 3 lecteurs MP3 compatibles avec la DRM Windows, les titres musicaux et/ou vidéos clips du Catalogue Universal Music sous réserve d'accepter au préalable les conditions générales d’utilisation sur www.neufmusic.fr et de veiller chaque mois à y renouveler votre licence :
- Avec "Neuf Music Initial", incluse dans l'offre "100% Neuf Box", vous avez accès aux titres musicaux dans un des neuf genres musicaux du Catalogue (Français ou Pop ou Rock ou Electro ou Rap/RnB ou Disco/Funk ou World ou Jazz/ Blues ou Classique). Vous ne pourrez pas changer le genre musical sélectionné lors de votre inscription sur www.neufmusic.fr. Sur un téléphone mobile, vous devez, au préalable, télécharger les fichiers sur votre PC.
- Avec l'option "Neuf Music Optimal", pour 4,99 € de plus par mois, vous avez accès à tous les titres musicaux et vidéos clips du Catalogue.>>

culabula

What more do I want? Well, music that actually sounds like music and that I own, to do with what I want.

I am happy with 8MB, though obviously 20MB+ would be preferable and the modern-day French service is commendable in this respect.

What I object to are these 'box' that are foisted upon the less-competent than yourself, that are a nightmare to configure and a horror to use. FT/Wannadoo/Orange have introduced them here, too. Ghastly.

culabula

P.S. -was it not a condition of getting the free calls that you HAD to use a neufbox (or whatever it is the others supply) otherwise, you got BB/TV but NOT free 'telephonie'?

probe

I suspect that many people have problems setting up home networks everywhere – however it is not relevant to this thread – which has to do with the competition that is generated by a properly functioning loop unbundling system, and the benefits derived for the consumer. Millions of households in France and elsewhere have LLU DSL and seem to manage to set their systems up to meet their domestic needs. It is no more difficult than getting DSL from the eircom monopoly (which has 95% of the Irish DSL market). (The Neufbox has WiFi, USB, and Ethernet connections, as well as connections for a TV set and an MPEG4 decoder for HDTV - http://offres.neuf.fr/adsl/adsl-neuf-box-decodeur-tv/adsl-decodeur-tv.html - all for about 60€ - yet another example of LLU competition working).

Ireland does not have a properly functioning loop unbundling system and as a result only 16% of people have broadband compared with 50 to 90% in the other “advanced” countries – see chart of country rankings. http://der.probe.googlepages.com/top25.png

Wireless and cable as an internet pipeline have all sorts of issues that ensure that they will be always be peripheral in their contribution to national broadband rollout. ComReg & co shouldn’t allow eircom to get away with LLU strangulation any longer. This nation can’t afford this.

.probe

culabula

I see that the HD 'neufbox' is a reworked Netgem TV decoder. Their SD boxes are of pitiful quality and their wifi add-on is once again "not much fun' to configure.This is the crowd who overnight shut down their forums and website in this market two years ago then fled same market because the locals were far too demanding in their quest for quality. Filer a l'anglaise, indeed.

I hope this version is far better.

Installing your new neuf connection is not the same as 'setting up a home network'. My point is -and it is relevant- that although there is much that is attractive in the French system, not all glitters like gold. The fact that so much power is placed in the hands of just one box is worrying and having tried to help friends set up their new wifi accessory -just one instance of the neufbox experience and a chargeable pc card-style add-on -I can attest that it is not as easy as a similar exercise here. In one instance it took me three days of travails changing the blessed thing from mode uniposte to mode multiposte only to have it then crash and totally cease and desist. No more broadband, no more free calls. Dead.

Many calls to neuf could not solve the problem but they did promise to have a man out in nine days.

Of course, this was all 18 months ago and perhaps today's neufboxes are far superior, maybe wifi is included by default and maybe the whole experience is far more reliable.With quadruple play a fact of life and technologies such as HDTV included and entrusted to just one box, I sure hope so.

tak

I'm getting about 6 to 10Mbps on wireless

From whom, Watty ?
How much is it putting you back a month ?
And is it (10 Mbps) enough for internet TV ?

Hagar

I don't know why people are going out of their way to run down N9uf, every service has some restrictions or strings attached. Sky+ recordings can't be accessed if you cancel your Sky+ sub, why would N9uf be different? As for the set up I've yet to come across any home wi-fi set up that didn't involve some cursing and swearing. A little patience and reading of the manual are usually all that is required.

Look at what they are offering at the price. Can you beat it there? Will I leave Wanadoo and sign up with N9ef? Hell no.

Thanks to the wonders of commercial competition I know that Wanadoo will be forced to offer a similar music service very soon or watch their customer base switch over. Similar TV and phones services are already available on Wanadoo/Orange.

Oh yeah one last thing, in France always on, un-limited download means just that. No cap.;)

culabula

I have six wifi access points in my home network including Airport Express, LocationFree television, my main router and so on. None involved any cursing and swearing, all were simple to install and all continue to work without problems each and every day.

Never -but never- in my experience have I ever come across something so ridiculously complicated as signing up for the wifi add-on from neuf. What should be just a plug-in into the box is a massive challenge, expensive and unless you're Lex Luthor (or the very brainy person of your choice) nigh-impossible to configure for multi-peripheral use. I found this to be standard for setups as typical as neuf, alice and, just last March, wannadoo.

None of this is to decry the fabulous advantages of the French system as I keep repeating. Speeds are the envy of all and the prices are more than attractive. What concerns me is that if the box fails -you lose everything, all your services. And me, I can see a lot of people very, very disgruntled if they are left without TV for an evening. Why, there might be a collective 'putain' uttered across the Hexagone.

In addition, while you may use your own equipment, I ask once again -is it not the case that to avail of the free telephony you MUST use a neufbox?

Hagar

Your correct about using the dedicated box to get the cheap/free phones. This applies to other providers like Wanadoo/Orange also. I don't bother with it as Skype does what I need. Nor do I use the TV service which also requires their original equipment to decode the stream.

I have a Netgear router, 2 wireless laptops, 2 wireless desktops, a Wii and a Nintendo DS and all were set up in minutes. Setting up Wandoo boxes for others did take a bit longer and was a bit of a pain but not impossible. Usually found external reasons contributing to the difficulties, such as the French method of building using mass steel reinforced concrete, a veritable Faraday cage in some instances.

culabula

Hagar wrote:

I have a Netgear router, 2 wireless laptops, 2 wireless desktops, a Wii and a Nintendo DS and all were set up in minutes. Setting up Wandoo boxes for others did take a bit longer and was a bit of a pain but not impossible. Usually found external reasons contributing to the difficulties, such as the French method of building using mass steel reinforced concrete, a veritable Faraday cage in some instances.

Then they must have changed the type of boxes/method. Just two years ago you 'added' wifi by paying a rental for a wifi PC card which then slotted into the box. This allowed access to one other (say) laptop and nothing more, presumably for some sort of security reasons. To change this to 'mode multiposte' required finding and downloading and installing a driver which, you were warned, might annoy the neufbox. Believe me, it did.

Hagar

I think it's easier now. Most just use a simple USB WiFi dongle. You can buy their one for €39 or get a Hercules/Trendnet one in Geant for €32. The device id and encryption key are printed on the bottom of their router and you just use them whem setting up your other devices.

rc28

culabula wrote:

It wasn't mentioned that there are huge restrictions on the downloads and that they disappear *pouf** the day you leave Neuf.

LOL, did you really expect them to just give away massive amounts of free music without drm , they have to pay a record company for that you know. Every music subscription service (monthly rental for unlimited downloads) uses drm on their tracks because otherwise people would just take out one month's subscription and download the entire music library:D
It's worth bearing in mind that you don't have to pay extra for this and neither are they forcing you to so i don't really get what your b*tching about?

culabula

The OP clearly described them as 'free downloads' and this is what I am objecting to. They aren't. You are entitled to rent the lossy files as part of your subscription while you remain a subscriber. Touting them as 'free downloads' in English or French implies something quite different.

rc28

culabula wrote:

The OP clearly described them as 'free downloads' and this is what I am objecting to. They aren't. You are entitled to rent the lossy files as part of your subscription while you remain a subscriber. Touting them as 'free downloads' in English or French implies something quite different.

They are "free" as in you don't pay anything extra for this new service. I don't see anything wrong with the term "free downloads" because that's what they are. It is your own personal opinion that it implies something else and that doesn't make you right. If the OP was to say "free drm-free music to keep forever" then obviously he wouldn't be accurate.
Neuf seem a heck of a lot better than eircom anyway!

culabula

rc28 wrote:

They are "free" as in you don't pay anything extra for this new service. I don't see anything wrong with the term "free downloads" because that's what they are. It is your own personal opinion that it implies something else and that doesn't make you right. If the OP was to say "free drm-free music to keep forever" then obviously he wouldn't be accurate.
Neuf seem a heck of a lot better than eircom anyway!

Agreed, they are, and I am in fortunate that I don't have to deal with Eircom in any shape or form.

I didn't say it made me right, but I am cautioning that this 'deal' is not all it seems and that is all I have been doing from the start while admiring the French model.

Not everything has been made clear with regard to this new offer, so let's just take a look.

The whole offer is windows-centric: if you don't have windows DRM managment on your PC, MP3 player or mobile, tough titty.

If you're a Mac user, tant pis.

You have only access to the music from one record company and of the nine genres on offer, only one of those.

To get access to all 9 genres then you must pay an extra 4,99€.

rc28

culabula wrote:

You have only access to the music from one record company and of the nine genres on offer, only one of those.

To get access to all 9 genres then you must pay an extra 4,99€.

To be fair Probe did make all of the above quite clear in his original post.
About the mac thing, i agree that it's pretty crappy that it's windows only but I'm sure mac users are used to subscription music services being that way-my brother uses parallels for his mac.

culabula

Well, when neuf introduced the free telephony two years ago, TalkTalk in the UK were very quick to follow suit and introduce free calls to 28 countries plus free broadband. I agree it was free because my bill decreased overnight by 16GBP, my speed went up, my calls now cost nada and generally it was a very good deal. They may now pick up on these latest changes in France but they do have the problem of BT's fine legacy cabling which is crippling higher speeds.

To come to the point, I hope that the Craphone/TalkTalk presence can eventually lead to LLU in the republic, I'm surprised that they haven't stolen a march on this.

probe

Hagar wrote:

I have a Netgear router

I use a Netgear router as well. They self-configure in about a minute - all they need in your user ID and password, and they work well with VoIP. I use Ethernet with WiFi switched off. For VoIP I use the Snom 300 SIPphone http://www.snom.com/en/snom300_voip_phone0.html
which gives better than ISDN call quality with the good ISP connection I have. My ISP wanted me to get one of their "boîtiers" too - no merci. My local cable TV service has about 300 channels with HD and I seldom watch TV anyway - and watching TV while surfing would slow down the internet connection. DSL TV is fine for a bedroom TV or similar where one mightn't be using the internet actively while watching TV.

.probe